This paper investigates the source of the gap in the relative wealth position of immigrant households residing in Australia, Germany and the United States. Our results indicate that in Germany and the United States wealth differentials are largely the result of disparity in the educational attainment and demographic composition of the native and immigrant populations, while income differentials...

This paper emphasizes the spatial nature of the job search process and analyzes the effects of job accessibility on search duration. A theoretical spatial job search model shows how the pattern and efficiency of job search activity may be affected by spatial labor market conditions. The empirical analysis develops unique measures of job accessibility. The results provide strong support of the s...

Many doctors in developing countries provide considerably lower levels of quality to their patients than they have been trained to provide. The gap between best practice and actual performance is difficult to measure for individual doctors who differ in levels of training and experience and who face very different types of patients. We exploit the Hawthorne effect—in which doctors change their ...

On the Post-Unification Development of Public and Private Pay in Germany German post-unification in the 1990s is a period that was marked by substantial economic change, part of which was East German wages building towards the much higher West German levels. This paper studies the public-private pay gap in the fast changing economic and political environment of the 1990s using panel estimation ...

By the time children leave primary school there is a large socio-economic gap in their reading proficiency. There are a number of potential explanations for this socio-economic gap and in this paper we investigate the role of three particular genes and geneenvironment interactions in determining children’s reading skills, using the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) datase...

Kick It Like Özil? Decomposing the Native-Migrant Education Gap We investigate second generation migrants and native children at several stages in the German education system to analyze the determinants of the persistent native-migrant gap. One part of the gap can be attributed to differences in socioeconomic background and another part remains unexplained. Faced with this decomposition problem...

Empirical evidence from U.S. studies suggests that, on average, female physicians earn less than their male counterparts. This gap in earnings does not disappear when individual and market characteristics are controlled for. This paper investigates whether a gender earnings difference can also be observed in a health care system predominantly financed by public insurance companies. Using a uniq...

On Human Capital Formation with Exit Options: Comment and New Results Katz and Rapoport (2005) conclude that with linear production technology and the possibility of unilateral migration, region-specific shocks may increase the average level of education. Previously, Poutvaara (2000) derived a corresponding result with Cobb-Douglas technology and migration which may go in both directions. This ...

We model ‘new ideas’ production in a panel of 17 emerging countries. Our results reveal: (i) ideas production is duplicative, (ii) externality associated with domestic knowledge stocks is of above unit factor proportionality, (iii) OECD countries raise the innovation-bar for emerging countries, (iv) there is no significant knowledge diffusion across emerging countries, and (v) growth in emergin...

Within the prospect theory the paper examines production and hedging decisions of a competitive firm under price uncertainty. We consider the prospect theory for the firm's utility function in the two moment model known as (mu,sigma)-preference. In contrast to the literature our findings show that the production under uncertainty can be larger than in the certainty case. Furthermore, we demonst...